Bob Alexander's Commentary

This is how Mrs. Dudley, the caretaker’s wife in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, warns the new tenants that they’ll be on their own in if anything goes awry at Hill House.

“So there won’t be anyone around if you need help. We couldn’t even hear you, in the night. No one could. No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that. In the night. In the dark,”

And that’s when nightmares come for us. When we’re asleep and defenseless and alone - in the night - in the dark, or as Stephen King wrote, “Whenthe moon is down and the hour is none.”

I know a lot about nightmares. I suppose we all do, but rarely do we talk about them. They’re just dreams after all. They’re not real. They’re not the stuff of small talk among friends over beers at a bar or sipping lattes at a Starbucks. If you tell anyone a dream you’ve had that ends with, “and when I looked back ... its eyes were full of blood,” the conversation will stop dead. Guaranteed.

No … nightmares are what you tell your shrink or the person who was sleeping next to you before you woke them up because you were thrashing, moaning, or screaming in the night.

And when your partner asks, “What was it?” You just can’t dismiss it as if it had been nothing … just a dream … not with your heart pounding and body slick with sweat … it was definitelysomething. For as long as it lasted, it was real. As the grave-digger in King’s Salem’s Lot said, “I didn’t see nothin’ and I never want to see it again.”

We describe looking objectively at people or events in “the cold harsh light of reality.” The Daytime, where things neatly add up. Laws apply. There is order. But no matter how deeply we cleave to logic during the day, when we close our eyes to sleep … Everythingis True in The Dark.

One of my favorite movies is director Don Siegel’s 1964 remake of The Killers. It was supposed to be one of the first “Made for TV” movies but someone at Universal thought it was too violent so it was released theatrically. Siegel directed two movies, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and Dirty Harry (1971), that are on my List of The 100 Best Movies Ever Made. And then there’s ... The Killers. As a friend of mine said, “Don Siegel was one of those directors who could make good pieces of a movie, but had a hard time making a complete movie." And The Killers is a very good example of that. It’s almost good. Too bad, because the cast is incredible: Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes, Angie Dickinson, Clu Gulager, and … in the last theatrical role of his 27-year long career … and the first time he ever played a bad guy … Ronald Reagan.

I watch this movie at least once every year. During the Reagan presidency I watched it more often than that. No matter how rotten the Real World became, because of the miracle of videotape, I could watch Lee Marvin shoot Ronald Reagan whenever I needed a little morale booster. There is justice somewhere in the world, even if it’s only in the movies.

I used to hate Ronald Reagan for a million reasons. The Republicans took an almost-has-been Hollywood celebrity, grafted him onto conservative bullshit, and thus created a president for the Yahoos of America. The Republicans could pick the pockets of the rubes while their celebrity front man razzle-dazzled the crowds with a line of patter sure to please the easy to please Morons of America.

Fucko the Clown, his miserable family, his rotten entourage, every single one of his voters, and the ruling Republican Party, are all united … in their shared love of hatred. And that is why things are only going to get worse … before they get to the absolute worst. Can I define what that is? No. But then why bother? Getting there is half the fun.

The modern era Republican Elite has historically had one agenda: they want to do whatever they want, make an obscene amount of money doing it, and then … pay no taxes.

That’s it.

The modern era Republican Elite wrap that agenda in the flag, the Bible, and Jesus. But those have always been smokescreens to obscure their real intent: Make Money … Pay No Taxes.

And of course, they are insane. No sane person would destroy the land, air, and water, for money regardless of the amount. But that’s what they do. You have to hate a mountain … so you can destroy it to get at the coal buried within it. You have to hate clean water so you can pollute it while cracking the Earth to get at the gas and oil. You have to hate the planet … in order to plunder it. And the hatred doesn’t stop there.

They hate … people. You have to hate people in order to feed them poisonous processed junk masquerading as food. You have to hate people in order to make a profit off their sickness. You have to hate people to deny them a living wage. You have to hate people to blow the shit out of them because they’re in a different country living on top of resources you think of as yours. And the hatred doesn’t end there.

Simply put … they hate everyone who isn’t of their sex, color or class.

From the election of Fucko the Clown to his inauguration, I’ve started … and stopped … seven “moments”. I can’t finish them. I’ll type out what I think is a pretty good sentence or paragraph, but when I read it again it just seems like so much junk. The stuff I write reads like the purple prose H.P. Lovecraft would crank out for Weird Tales magazine at a penny per word. But what the hell … we’re inside a Pulp Fiction world where every day is another issue of Amazing Stories. Just because something sounds like an article from Famous Monsters of Filmland doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

About a week ago, a friend of mine sent me an email with this subject line, “We are headed towards the demise of our Democracy.”

That title just pisses me off. It implies that we're here ... the cliff is over there… and we should all gettogether and dosomething before we go sailing off into the abyss.

I wrote back that I thought the “demise of our democracy” was pretty much a done deal when the Supreme Court decided who our president was back in December 2000. Fuck the voice of The People. George W. Bush is president of The United States - so suck on that.

Ever since the shitshow ended a couple of nights ago there has been a plethora of polite analyses of What The Fuck Just Happened. Desperate pundits are trying to be reasonable while describing how and why Fucko the Clown just won the election.

This is what Denial looks like:

The hubris of Hillary Clinton and the DNC empowered them to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders because not only did she “deserve” the presidency, but they believed she could beat Fucko in the general election. Clinton, the DNC, and their donors, completely underestimated, or ignored, the Hillary hatred that has been simmering for decades, as well as the contempt voters have for establishment politics.

True. But the most insidious form of denial is always true. But it is not the whole truth. That is why denial is a complete waste of time and doesn't solve anything. It is always easier to accept and believe a partial truth because it is a distraction that keeps us from recognizing the larger, more uncomfortable truth.

Occam's razor. Noun. The maxim that assumptions introduced to explain a thing must not be multiplied beyond necessity.

Let's see how it works.

59,821,874 Americans voted for Fucko the Clown therefore there are 59,821,874 Crazy Stupid People in the United States. Regardless of the fact that the previous sentence sounds like a harsh generalization … it is not. The only way anyone could vote for Fucko is if he/she is a Crazy Stupid Person. Rational smart people could not vote for, would never vote for, anyone like Fucko the Clown for president.

That's it. That's all we need to know. There were enough Crazy Stupid People in the United States on November 8, 2016, to elect Fucko the Clown.